Virginia politics: May elections bring low turnout

Jeff Stodghill has won two races for Newport News School Board but he's still a frustrated man.

"I put all this energy into it. I thought I had messages, but a lot of people just voted on name familiarity, and that's disappointing. It is what it is. I tried everything I could to get my message out," Stodghill said.

This past Tuesday, Stodghill narrowly won re-election by just 55 votes. Only 4 percent of voters in the Central District took the time to say they wanted him to represent them.

In Newport News, three separate School Board races were decided by margins as tight or tighter. It was one of the city's closest election nights in decades.

But despite the competitive nature of the races, voter turnout was just 8 percent. May elections in Virginia usually bring out a small fraction of the voters who come out for presidential, mid-term congressional or gubernatorial elections.

"Maybe the question isn't so much about the number of people who vote, but the number of people who are paying attention," said Quentin Kidd, a political scientist at Christopher Newport University.

Turnout may be low in May elections, but it represents voters who really care, he said.

"I believe democracy generally works better when there is more opportunity to participate," said John McGlennon, a political scientist at the College of William and Mary. He also is a member of the James City County Board of Supervisors, winning in a November 2011 race in which the turnout was 38 percent.

Smaller turnouts tend to mean the more affluent in a community get a larger voice — and that can often be reflected in the positions local councils, supervisors and school boards take, he said. It also builds in stability for the incumbent — or, in some cases, a kind of lock on office.

And the timing of an election is one of the key factors that determines turnout, he said.

Boosting turnout

In Virginia, cities determine when municipal elections will be held, according to Rose Mansfield, a spokeswoman for the State Board of Elections.

"They can do May or November," Mansfield said. "Most have converted to November, but there's a quite a few out there with May."

Mansfield said moving the elections requires voter approval on a ballot referendum. Usually, advocates argue a shift to November will boost turnout and cut costs.

In 2010 the city of Portsmouth moved its municipal elections to November, which Mayor Kenny Wright said has helped engage more people in the voting process.

He said May elections have hindered voter participation in other cities in Hampton Roads.

"Some of these turnouts are less than 10 percent in some of these off years," Wright said. "You'll wind up getting people that probably aren't good candidates but get elected because no one shows up," he said. "People shouldn't complain if they don't come out to vote."

Wright later added he wasn't specifically referring to any of the elected officials in Hampton Roads.

"If you look at the results of these turnouts, and Newport News only had 8 percent, with three school board seats only within 50 votes of each other, that's a mess," Wright said.

"Norfolk and Chesapeake still have their elections in May and [Norfolk] Mayor Fraim only had 11,000 votes and he's got over 250,000 people in his city. With the Chesapeake results, each one of those guys only got seven or eight thousand votes," Wright said. "That's horrible for cities of their magnitude."

This year, Hampton's turnout was just 14 percent, as was Norfolk's, even though the mayoral and council races were contested. Chesapeake's top vote-getter won his at-large council seat with the approval of just 6.5 percent of the city's voters.

That's well below the 40 percent turnout typical of gubernatorial races, or the nearly 30 percent seen when both the state Senate and House of Delegates are up for election, as they will be in 2015. Presidential election turnout tops 70 percent.

Stodghill said he thinks moving elections to November would lead to more engaged voters.

"I don't profess to be an expert at what the best scenario would be. But in November you have the people's attention," Stodghill said. "The only risk with it in this day in age, you see a lot of effort spent to polarize elections. The local election might suffer from that."

Polarization

The prospect of national party involvement in local elections concerns Newport News City Councilman Bert Batemen, who ran unopposed on Tuesday.

Batemen said moving the elections might cause well-qualified candidates to decline the chance to run for public office locally.

"I think there would be many people of stature that might not want to become involved in a race where they would have their views automatically subject to the political forces of the national parties at that level," he said.